Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon has spent close to half his life in the United States, writing in English. But in all that time, his primary landscape, the map inside his head, has remained a fine-grained, street-by-street, multi-sensory memory of Sarajevo, the city of his birth.

In his short stories, novels and memoir pieces, Hemon restlessly re-creates his homeland, masterfully deploying his second language to burrow deep into his memories and render them freshly evocative and painful.